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Shadowsoul
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 Posted: Fri Apr 23, 2010 11:12 am Post subject: Unlimited Detail Graphics |
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ATtrImCx4
what do we think?
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slugonamission
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| Posted: Fri Apr 23, 2010 11:24 am Post subject: |
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Is there a version of that video that isn't targetted at 3 year olds?
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Shadowsoul
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| Posted: Fri Apr 23, 2010 11:46 am Post subject: |
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there are further videos explaining certain features of it, comparing certain renderings to crysis and modern games
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mailmerge
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| Posted: Fri Apr 23, 2010 4:57 pm Post subject: |
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From what I understand, you can't move/animate anything, or apply physics easily that way. But it's neat, and I really hope they do get picked up by someone
"...one's called ATI and the one's called nVidia and they don't seem to like each other very much." |
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Val
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| Posted: Fri Apr 23, 2010 4:58 pm Post subject: |
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Faaaaaaaaaake. also ooooooooooooollllllllllllllllld.
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Georgy291
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| Posted: Fri Apr 23, 2010 7:42 pm Post subject: |
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| right so tessalation then? |
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-=jt=-
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| Posted: Fri Apr 23, 2010 8:54 pm Post subject: |
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old but not proven fake yet.
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Cosmo
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| Posted: Fri Apr 23, 2010 9:35 pm Post subject: |
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| Georgy291 wrote: | | right so tessalation then? |
Not quite, tesselation is more about how to use maths to generate higher polygon counts on the fly inside the GPU hardware. This quote sums it up quite well:
"What all this means is that fully compliant DirectX 11 hardware can procedurally generate complex geometry out of relatively sparse data sets, improving bandwidth and storage requirements."
See: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2329315,00.asp
As far as i can tell, the "infinite detail" approach uses a vast set of point data (the 'point cloud') which has been somehow compressed down to a manageable size. This point cloud effectively defines the status of all points in a three dimensional space (lowered to a sensible granularity whereby anything smaller cannot be percieved by humans), and then renders to a two dimensional image using what must be an exceedingly clever search algorithm. The algorithm presumably must be fast enough to calculate all the variables required to make the frame of the textured and lit point cloud based on location and perspective enough times per second to generate a sensible frame rate.
This is why he's claiming 'infinite geometry', as the granularity of size between each point of rendering becomes so small that we can no longer see the differently rendered pieces and they merge into the intended shape. A good analogy might be a wheel. We know that the curvature of the wheel is created by billons upon billons of atoms, but that's at a level that's so far beyond our perception we simply see the result of those building blocks ... a circular object.
Even with tesselation you're still using the old trick of using enough triangles to make things look curved, though it's a big improvement.
While this sounds like a revolutionary approach, the things that concern me are:
1: How much storage does the point cloud data take?
2: Why is this being done in software? Does the nature of the algorithm mean that it's difficult to express as a SIMD problem, thereby meaning that GPU's could not accelerate it? Could you build custom hardware that could deal with this problem?
3: How are artists going to create the assets to be expressed with this new rendering technology? |
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slugonamission
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| Posted: Fri Apr 23, 2010 9:56 pm Post subject: |
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Cosmo - there are voxel editor tools, or you could do a build from the normal polys, which seems to defeat the purpose of this. Also, I don't think you could do the search on the GPU easily (at least with conventional shaders). With the advent of CUDA and DirectCompute though, I'm not sure (I've not looked into these technologies much).
The other thing that will be interesting is occlusion. Sure, straight occlusion is easy in this, but transparency could be a massive pain in the balls, and something that isn't shown in this video. As you start looking at more graphics techniques, I can see this problem getting harder.
Also, yeah, this isn't tessellation. Tessellation still uses triangle faces (if you want, give me a shout, one of the DX11 SDK samples gives a very nice demonstration of LoD using tessellation), this is literally points in space.
Animation should work on the same methods, and so should physics (just approximate it with a bounding box, or use spheres all over the object). These technologies should be independent of the underlying mesh representation. Apparently NVIDIA is also skeptical about this though (http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Polygons-Voxels-Graphics-Rendering-GPU,10250.html)
This is an interesting idea, and ideas like this are the future of 3D (Carmack is even looking into using voxel based rendering for iD's next engine), I'm just not sure of the scalability (and as Cosmo says, the sheer space required to store the geometry. It's not that bad for models, but when you get to the actual world, it's going to be huge). Give me a technical demo and we'll see how scalable it is 
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Shadowsoul
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| Posted: Sat Apr 24, 2010 3:29 am Post subject: |
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| Val wrote: | | Faaaaaaaaaake. also ooooooooooooollllllllllllllllld. |
you're old
and also, surely graphics cards would just turn into mass memory storage and extra cpu power if this was fully implemented?
the demos they currently have are 1024x768 running on a single core processor, and not done by professional artists. I forget my point, i'll respond in the morning when i'm sober
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slugonamission
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| Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2010 9:44 am Post subject: |
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It's just a realtime rendering engine with a hell of a lot of features. It's still poly based though.
To render something like in that video in full realtime though, you'd probably need two 5870s in Crossfire at least 
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Cosmo
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| Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2010 12:54 pm Post subject: |
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| slugonamission wrote: | It's just a realtime rendering engine with a hell of a lot of features. It's still poly based though.
To render something like in that video in full realtime though, you'd probably need two 5870s in Crossfire at least |
It doesn't look like it offers a huge amount over the other established engines. |
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slugonamission
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| Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2010 1:11 pm Post subject: |
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Looking at the feature list, it supports more than the current engines. It'd be interesting to see how it fared against CryEngine 3 though...
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xstyr
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| Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2010 3:59 pm Post subject: |
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Hmm I'd really like to know the search algorithm they're using, I guess you could have a naive attempt at working out the voxels to view in the same way you'd do a 1 step ray trace? (if that makes sense)
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slugonamission
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| Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2010 6:54 pm Post subject: |
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At 720p, it's not completely unbelievable, but will probably need a lot of preprocessing and performance hacks. There's not /too/ much going on in the scenes either. I'd still like to see a real executable demo to prove it though...
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